Although Dr. Einstein has shaken our faith in the very existence of an absolute standard of measure or weight, the expression of length, area, volume and weight by comparison with standards which to our senses appear to be stable will continue to be a necessity of human society, even of the very existence of mankind. As John Quincy Adams stated it:

“Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessaries of life to every individual…. They enter the economical arrangements and daily concerns of every family. They are necessary to every occupation of human industry; to the distribution and security of every species of property; every transaction of trade and commerce; to the labors of the husbandman; to the ingenuity of the artificer; to the studies of the philosopher; to the researches of the antiquarian; to the navigation of the mariner and the marches of the soldier, to all the exchanges of peace and all the operations of war.”

The Society has just been presented with the business records of Bigelow, Kennard and Company, of Boston, one of the oldest jewelry firms in this country. The papers fill over sixty packing cases. A preliminary inspection of them has revealed about a dozen letters from an army officer, stationed in New Mexico in the early 1850's, shortly after it came into the possession of the United States, which give a most interesting glimpse at the isolated and sometimes adventurous life of an army post in the Apache country, and at the ways in which business reached the frontiers of the great West.

We are indebted to Mr. E. A. S. Clarke, Secretary of the American Iron and Steel Institute, for calling our attention to an article in the 1901 Transactions of the British Institute which places the oldest joint-stock enterprise in the world at Domnarfvet, Sweden. It is the Stora Kopparbergs (Great Copper Mountain) Mining Company, deriving its name from the celebrated copper mine at Falun, where one of its plants is located.

One of the primary purposes of the founders of The Business Historical Society was to effect the preservation of valuable historical documents and records which, for one reason or another, are so often destroyed by their owners. Not always, however, is the Society able to do so.

An amusing and at the same time heartbreaking instance came to its attention recently where an old Maine farmhouse had been subjected to a housecleaning, and where the owners reported they had found many letters signed by Abraham Lincoln. Supposing that the signatures might be of value, they clipped out all the signatures and burned the letters.

Last March, Mr. Franklin E. Parker, Jr., published in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine an article on the association organized for the aid and support of the Harvard College Library. In this article, the needs of a large and progressive library, and the ways in which the public can help to fill those needs, are so well presented that The Business Historical Society has obtained permission to reprint some extracts from it.

A Short time ago the Society came into possession of what is probably a unique collection. It is a potpourri from the history of transportation, fourteen bound volumes, and nearly twice as much loose material in boxes and folders — newspaper clippings, some of them dating back to the beginning of the last century, on turnpikes, canals, stages, taverns, railroads, steamboats, ferries, ships and shipbuilding, coal, express-riders, and every subject which could conceivably have had anything to do with transportation, including the ubiquitous lottery.

In An earlier issue of the Bulletin there was a description of an incunabulum printed at Venice in 1494, the first historical treatise on accountancy. Two months ago the Society acquired a volume which goes back even further into the cradle days of printing. It is a very early book on commerce. It was presented to the Society by Mr. Joseph P. Day in coöperation with officers of the Society.

Mr. Joseph P. Day of New York has again added to the collection of the Society, this time with an interesting assortment of three English books from the eighteenth century, and a fourth relating to the canal-building fever with which American cities were taken early in the nineteenth. The first item consists of two volumes of quotations on the London Stock Exchange, in 1725 and 1737. The earlier one is published by “John Castaing, Broker, at his Office at the Stationers, next the General-Post-Office in Lombard-Street”; the second by his widowed sister and another broker, Richard Shergold.

Vocational guidance, as an effective development, has come only since the beginning of the century. But as long ago as 1795 Henry MacKenzie protested against wasting the years of youth at school “improving talents without having ever discovered them.”

Again in 1836, the idea appears in a book entitled “The Panorama of Trades and Professions,” a copy of which has come to the Society, written by Edward Hazen of Philadelphia. The book was “intended for the use of Schools and Families, as well as for miscellaneous readers.” In the preface, Mr. Hazen deplores the fact that “many individuals mistake their appropriate calling, and engage in employments for which they have neither mental nor physical adaptation,…and hence arise, in great measure, the ill success and discontent which so frequently attend the pursuits of men.”

“A true picture” of frontier life in Illinois is preserved in the reminiscences of a Yorkshire woman who, with her husband and five young children, immigrated in 1831. From the time she left England to the time she returned for a visit, mistress of a large and thriving farm, she maintained her indomitable courage, and the critical aloofness of the foreigner.

Her first night in Illinois was spent in a log cabin, where the “little lady, exceedingly fond of smoking, as Americans generally are, particularly the females,” expected to be paid for her hospitality, even though the family used its own provisions. The Yorkshireman, on whose recommendation they had come, appeared shortly, “verily, as ragged as a sheep,” and they moved their quarters to his house, which “was more like the cell of a hermit who aims at super-excellence by enduring privations than the cottage of an industrious peasant.”

The history of liquor, from the time when Noah “planted a vineyard and drank of the wine” to the controversy over the eighteenth amendment to our Constitution, has been presented to the Society by the heirs of George C. Dempsey. Everything pertaining to the subject is liberally represented: receipts for wassail bowl (to be served with three pieces of toasted bread floating in it), milk posset (the receipt furnished by Sir Walter Raleigh), and 'rack punch (the beverage on which the Collector of Boggley Wallah disgraced himself at “Vanity Fair”); legislation, from the excise laws under the Stuarts to the licensing of American saloons; what the complete brewer should know; adulteration of liquor; temperance; prohibition; and the praise of wine.

A very amusing picture of an East India voyage in the early 'sixties is left us in one of a small collection of log books recently presented to the Society. By the time of the Civil War the importance of sailing craft was already on the wane, but it was not until after the war that the real change from sails to steam power began, and in 1862 a fleet of vessels still made profit of New England handicaps by carrying ice to the tropical ports.

During the months of July and August, several members of the staff of The Business Historical Society, Inc., found it possible to combine business with vacations and to make a number of connections of national and international importance.